ดาวเหนือ

Polaris holds the Alpha designation in Ursa Minor, the Little Bear, and is additionally listed as 1 Ursae Minoris in the Flamsteed system. It is a yellow-white F-type star, an intermediate spectral class whose colour index of 0.636 reflects a surface cooler than white A stars but warmer than the orange K types. Though it appears at a moderate apparent magnitude of 1.97, its absolute magnitude of −3.64 reveals substantial intrinsic luminosity, a brightness muted by its distance of some 433 light-years. That gap between apparent and true brightness is typical of luminous stars observed across several hundred light-years of space.